Chapter Text
It’s been hard since you left that hellhole.
There were way too many of you in that house, crawling over each other like puppies looking for a bitch’s teat, and you wanted to get out. Your youngest brother, too, little baby Dave, he shouldn’t have been born into a life like that and he was so much younger than the rest and he needed you, looked up to you as the oldest to protect him.
Only six years old, and you’d regularly come home from your senior-year half-day of high school to find the old man passed out on the couch stinking of ten-dollar vodka and Dave passed out in his bed, glass shards all over the living room and welts all over your little bro’s skin. Only six years old, already affectionately nicknamed “Satan” and mocked as hellspawn by the harpy. Only six years old, and his flinch was visible every time you’d go to hug him, his eyes way too wide as he tracked your every movement and kept his back to the wall.
No wonder he took to blades so well. He found one of yours in the new shithole apartment you rented, a little butterfly knife, and you were gonna yell at him to stop messing with it, he’d put his eye out, before he flipped it over in his hand like a pro and gave a little gap-toothed grin. Well. Huh. Look at that, the little fuck-faced prodigy. It had made you smile, and so, once you got your next paycheck, you told yourself you’d buy him something like that. Not a real blade, he’d slice himself. A practice sword. Something real and big to hold, something to make him feel powerful.
Of course, paychecks were few and far between these days. Not like you weren’t trying to pay the bills, keep the electricity on, put food on the table, but whatever you thought you could make with your hands is turning into deformed neon pieces of plush-ass shit, and so you turned to the oldest profession to try to make your way.
Not the way you wanted to do things. It left you exhausted by the end of the day, feeling used and empty and soulless. On the job, you couldn’t think about why you were doing it or they’d call an hour break and you’d get chewed out by the guy behind the camera not to break a scene like that—it’s bad form to lose a boner because you’re thinking of your lil bro. You can’t tell him. You could never tell him. All you can hope is that he never, ever finds out the name they gave you.
Still, six months out and there’s nothing. Prospects dried up. The malformed bastards you sew together by hand aren’t selling. Your apartment’s full of the detritus of two kids trying to start a new life together—mismatched pieces of furniture, empty bags of Doritos littered on the cigarette-burned carpet, and Dave barely has a mattress to sleep on right now. You offered for him to take the futon, let you sleep on the piece of shit, but that look in his eye told you that he wasn’t accepting any pity.
You got desperate. You whored yourself out—more than before. That one time with that one guy in college has turned into skin and heat and sweat and grunts for eight hours a day. The plush rump you were born with ends up making your life fucking miserable, and you start running out of excuses to tell Dave as to why you hardly ever sit up any more.
Everything hurts. Every muscle in your body is sore and tense; anywhere with a nerve ending constantly feels like it’s prickling painfully. Every time you have to stop and think, every time you let your mind wander off, it goes to unpleasant places and twists you in terrible ways. And every time you look at Dave, your heart goes a little sideways in your chest, a weight sinking even further onto your shoulders.
You love him. So much. You want him to have a better life than this. Getting out was supposed to make things better, not worse. And now? Now you can hardly take care of yourself, let alone this little runt.
It’s little surprise that he starts getting into places he shouldn’t go.
He’s almost seven now, six months after you picked up and left, and he’s a clever little sonofabitch. Though you’ve tried to trick him by keeping your martial materials in unsuspecting places, he’s starting to find out your little hidey-holes and trigger your traps. He’s pretty good about hiding his discoveries from you, but not by much.
It’s Saturday. Twelve hours ago, some dude who made you call him Jorge was only following the sadistic director’s advice when he brutalized you for the entire afternoon and pushed you into overtime. You really need to get out of this business. Today, you’ve promised yourself you’ll get a caffeine IV going, research this whole Web site stuff, and maybe set up a little Internet business, since you can’t peddle these obnoxious little Smurf-things to anyone you know in person. Still, you’re irritable as fuck, wanting to lash out against the industry, against your coworkers, against the assholes who pit you against each other and don’t seem to care that you’re more than your dick—
Before you catch Dave playing with your baby.
That long, slim, wicked motherfucker of a blade is called Abel. He’s tasted blood—and he is his brother’s keeper. Because of that thing, you were able to keep the worst of the physical influences away from Dave, as long as you were around to intercept them in time. It was expensive as hell, cost you everything you earned for your first two years of high school, and goddamn was it worth the price you paid. The leather of the handle is perfectly fitted by now to the grooves of your hand; though the blade has a patina on it, it’s no less sharp, the edge still as razor-thin as it was on day one.
Dave has his hand wrapped around the handle, trying to make his child-sized fingers align with your grip. That’s fucking adorable. He’s such a strong kid. You’re just afraid he’s gonna hurt himself—and when he draws the blade from its sheath, for a second you’re convinced that he’s sliced open his arm and you’ll have a very awkward trip to the ER that you won’t be able to pay for. But no, those are old scabs on the insides of his forearms; the blade gleams in the Houston morning, and Dave looks at it with his little mouth hanging open with wonder.
It’s when he starts doing practice slashes with it, leaping around his room trying to jump and hack at things, that you have to interrupt. “Dave, what the hell do you think you’re doing.”
Dave freezes with his back to you, practically in midair. His shoulders hunch up, his arms tense, and when he lands, it’s on silent feet. You don’t like the way the silence has settled thick in the room. More than that, you don’t like what it’s done to him. Usually you don’t have to dad him around this much, but you’re not about to just let this slide. That thing is yours, dammit, and he needs to respect that. “I’m sorry,” comes out of his mouth in tiny, whimpered words.
“Put it down.” Oh, fuck, there’s that parental thing again, you don’t like doing this but you have to.
When he moves to set the sword down, he reaches for the nearest surface—the little table propped up by a stack of VHS tapes that you have him use as a desk. That instrument of death is now nestled up against spelling papers and addition tables. Dave turns to face you, hands shaking, and his eyes are wider than you’ve ever seen them before. “I’m sorry,” he says again, a little-kid lisp between missing teeth.
He’s scared to death, the poor little shit. “C’mere.” You wanna give him a hug, tell him it’s okay and that you just don’t want him to hurt himself.
“I’m sorry,” Dave repeats. It’s like a mantra with him now. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” He steps closer to you, pulls you by your belt loops out of his doorway and into the room. “I’m sorry…”
This is happening to somebody else. Not you. This can’t be happening to you. Your little brother, the not-yet-seven-year-old, is wheeling you around so you sit on his mattress with a whump and a whine. He looks for a minute like he’s going to sit in your lap and crawl into your arms and ask you to hold him, but you know him, he doesn’t like that much physical contact, so what the fuck is going on? He drops to his knees in front of you, reaches up to hug you around the waist—briefly, so briefly, like losing a sweatshirt you tied around your middle—and then—
Dave’s eyes are wide, glossy, and utterly blank as he undoes the button at the front of your jeans.
Your chafed genitals are trying to retract into your chest cavity. This is bad. This is really, really bad. This is nauseatingly horrifying. Your little brother is between your knees and trying to get into your pants and his mouth is hanging open and you can see where he’s missing his baby teeth and his breath smells like Cheerios and sour milk and his tiny child hands are fumbling with your zipper and you are absolutely frozen in place with absolutely no idea what to do before it comes out of you with the force of a thousand ‘no’s: “Stop!”
Dave’s reaction is immediate, paralyzed in place even as he was trying to peel away your fly to reveal your boxers. Now that you’ve said that, you can see tears gathering in his eyes, his lower lip wibbling a little. “I’m sorry.” It’s like he doesn’t know any other words.
“What the fuck are you doing?” You sound a little more alarmed than you’d planned. First of all, your body hates you right now. On top of that, your mind is trying to make you projectile vomit. This is wrong. This is very wrong. This is a fucking Dateline special, why-don’t-you-take-a-seat-Mr.-Strider, last known photographs and smiling images of children while a narrative of innocence lost plays over a haunting piano refrain.
And meanwhile, little Dave is just sitting back on his heels, sniffling a little, wet tracks going through the freckles on his cheeks. “I thought…” He trails off. He can’t meet your eyes. “I could tug it,” he mumbles. “I could sit on your lap.”
Tug your dick. Sit on your dick. Oh my fucking jesus christ what is happening here. “No—Dave, no, what the fuck, no—no!” There are not enough ‘no’s and none of them will ever be loud enough. Who the fuck is this little shit and what did they do with your kid brother.
Dave really starts crying now, little hiccupped child-sobs as his hands curl into little fists at your knees. “I don’t want the belt,” he cries out. “Or the bottle. It hurts.”
Now that his hands are off some areas you really wish didn’t exist right now, you zip up and look down at him. He thinks you’re going to whip him. Beat him until glass shatters over his skin. “Dave,” you whisper, more to yourself than the pitiful child in front of you. “What the fuck did he do to you?”